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AUSTIN, TEX.—Neil Young might have come to South by Southwest flogging a product like everyone else, but at least he flogged it passionately.

The 68-year-old expat-Canadian rock legend spoke before a packed event hall at the Austin Convention Centre on the cusp between the SXSW Interactive conference and the SXSW music festival on Tuesday evening ostensibly to plug the high-fidelity Pono music device he’s been threatening us with for nearly three years now. It’s now aimed for an October release with an expected retail of $399.

Really, though, his speech was a heartfelt plea for a return to proper audio fidelity in an age where music has been squashed dynamically, chopped into bite-sized form and cheapened as a recorded commodity by the dominant MP3 format.

I haven’t heard a Pono player for myself yet. All we got a glimpse of Tuesday were some projected stock pictures of the gadget and a couple more that Young briefly waved from his pockets onstage — for the record, the Pono looks rather like a second-generation iPod Nano thickened out into a stand-up, triangular shape.

However, if the thing does what Young says it does, it could be the portable digital player that audiophiles have been yearning for years.

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He certainly managed to rally a list of rock royals that included Bruce Springsteen, Jack White, Dave Grohl, the Arcade Fire, Duane Eddy and many others to provide awed video testimony of the system’s power in a reel that ran midway through his session.

The proof will come, as they say, in the pudding, and if you’d like to get your fingers in that pudding, there’s a Kickstarter campaign that, by Wednesday morning, had already surpassed its $800,000 goal — in under 24 hours — by more than $500,000.

For now, though, Young’s quest to bring vinyl-quality sound to a generation of music consumers accustomed to listening to thin MP3 files through laptop speakers and earbuds “that look like lozenges,” as he put it on Tuesday, seems heartfelt, even if he’s got a tough battle ahead of him in unseating the iPod as the dominant portable music machine.

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“If it’s a success or it isn’t a success, music wins,” he said. “Because it’s available. It’s freedom of choice.”

Whether or not Pono delivers what it promises — which is to play back audio files at the studio-quality resolution the artist originally intended, up to an including a whopping 9,216 kilobits per second versus the iTunes/industry standard of 256 kbps — one could at least feel the ache in Young’s voice when he talked about how kids being raised in the digital age aren’t properly “nourished” by three-dimensional, immersive sound.

“They can identify the name of the song and they can learn the melody from listening to it, but inside their souls they’re just not getting what we got because there’s just nothing there for them. The human body is so sensitive . . . when it sees great art, it feels good. (So) with our music, we were deprived and we started getting very little, a minuscule 1/20th of what we listened to.”

In a roundabout way, Young conceded that the Pono and its accompanying, iTunes-esque delivery service might be strictly for the serious audiophile. But he touched a definite nerve with the SXSW crowd when he lamented that the rise of the MP3 and the one-off digital single had done irreparable damage to rock ‘n’ roll’s veneration of the album as a sacred form.

“I was pissed off about that because I loved making records,” he said. “They’re a family of songs that were telling a story of how I was feeling. They weren’t just ‘filler.’ ”

With Pono, he promised, “you get to feel not just what the artist intended you to feel” and — if the original recordings warrant it — it’ll make your car or your headphones or your expensive home stereo “sound like God.”

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